It's a Trap - Digital Dystopias and Analogue Communities
via my 12 year old self's Star Wars diary
The Force Awakens
When I was 12, I started my first diary. It was a grey hard-back Star Wars themed notebook with cheap, ‘slidey’ pages adorned with quotes from the early 2000s reboot. It was most certainly not aimed at preteen girls on the edge of discovering ‘big school’, shifting self awareness and most importantly, alternative music. It did however become my first foray into creative journaling. A place where I doodled out ideas, attempted terrible poetry based on Avril Lavigne lyrics and spilled my teenage dilemmas and angst with reckless abandon. I branded these freestyle rants ‘brain vomits’ due to how purged I felt after letting the torrents in my developing brain out onto the page.
By the time I started university years later, I was understandably a very different person (the acceleration of growth between 12 and 18 is nauseating when you think on it), but I still kept a diary. By this stage I was no longer writing about school day encounters or reviewing Nirvana albums (that had been out at least 10 years already), but I was still using writing as a means of therapy. Strong scribbled biro sketches accompanied illegible notes and musings about the future. Any feeling that felt ‘too big’ would always look manageable after I’d explored it through long, twisty, very ungrammatically correct sentences.
As adult life, and the internet, began to mature in the early 2010s, my diary fell out of favour. I had countless notebooks and a stationery obsession that still demands a lot of my disposable income, but never one centralised spot that could house the full spectrum the way my Star Wars diary and its descendants could.
The Phantom Menace
In hindsight, I can see that a lot of my life has since been processed online. Whether a shared meme, Facebook group message of Instagram story, I began to document my adventures through apps. These felt easy, intuitive and best of all, social. I could curate the best parts of my creative endeavours and find community, or at least a view count online. They even let me post heavy music on top, something my paper diaries could never dream of.
However, I’ve come to realise that for all the convenience of these platforms in my 20s, they’ve failed to document my adventures the way I thought they would. Sure, I could go back and search my archives for memories of life in Lofoten or that time I took a chance on a ad and ended up in Brighton for the month. But I just, don’t. Worse still, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that whilst these are my memories, the content associated with them do not belong to me.
The Empire Strikes Back
The past few years have seen my time online change. I deactivated Facebook due to my feed being too distracting and not even anything to do with my friends the way it was in 2009. Personal Instagram posts became annual events and I limited my scrolling time after noticing spikes in anxiety and comparison stealing my peace. My ‘business’ profile for design documented my MA and became that initial snapshot of my work for anyone interested. I deactivated Twitter years ago when I realised the only way to work it was to fight the whole world - and this was before the its current iteration. After approximately 30 seconds on TikTok I decided that it could get fucked. Too loud, too fast, too demanding.
Whilst I was already beginning to feel uneasy on these platforms for personal reasons and experiences, I heard rumblings of discontent amongst creative communities. I was urged to ‘glaze’ my work and ‘opt-out’ of feeding Meta’s AI machines and algorithms. Whilst am under no illusion of grandeur (thanks Wicked for teaching me that phrase) that the Zuckerverse is using my work to train its AI, I began to realise that I was uncomfortable with profit made from selling data that bypassed the identity of the person being sold. I began to realise that even if it wasn’t exploiting me directly, I didn’t like this business model.
I noticed the way social media was becoming less social and more a great void which people scream at each other across. Nuance was butchered, grey spaces of discourse and learning phased out for rage bait and false headlines. And then the second inauguration of a felon was adorned with a symbol of hate and we all began to move Orwell’s 1984 out of the Fiction section and into Current Events.
Reader, I’m out.
A New Hope
So, like a lot of us, I’ve become digitally displaced. I’m researching my options, again knowing it will make little difference to anyone but myself. I’m mourning the internet of my youth (which, by the way, was still pretty nefarious) and seeking new ways to connect. I won’t lie, I’m not entirely sure it can be done. An analogue community you say? As in, face to face? Facial emotions as well as emojis? Actually, laughing out loud? How does one ROFLcopter in person? I’m not sure.
However I’m just about old enough to remember that it was done offline before. I can remember scrolling through books or getting lost in a 8-bit screen. I listen to old music and wonder how people came across artists if Spotify didn’t wrap them up for them at the end of the year. I went to the library and took out a book, slowly stretching my attention span back out like I was working pasta dough. It collapsed a lot at first, overstretched and far from appetising, but it’s slowly getting there.
It is this search for long form content that has brought me to Substack. Whilst I would like to banish the online forever somedays, its worth remembering the idea of complex grey areas which have been so brutally dispatched in many online ‘communities’. Basically, it ain’t all bad. I hope.
The wonderful Poorna Bell made me rethink my original ‘Anadon ship!’ kneejerk reaction as Voldemort and co. re-entered the White House and big tech took off it’s mask, opened its mouth and dropped to its knees.
In the caption Poorna continues:
Do what’s right for you but don’t allow them to bully you off or remove your voice. That is what they want and what they are trying to do. Think about all the communities and whole demographics that have come under fire in 7 days alone. Your voice matters, maybe now more than ever.
Whilst I am turning off the screen in an attempt to go meet some physical people, the only thing I fear more than the gaping online chasm of polarised opinions is one single voice which is unchecked and unchallenged. I’m trying to work out if my absence is more of an act of resistance than showing up. Quite frankly, I think I can still be more of a pain in the arse by showing up fully myself and enjoying my life. It’s a tiny act of resistance but anyone who has ever had a gnat bite knows how uncomfortable that small act becomes. At this stage, I’m not too proud to be petty.
Return of the Jedi
As a designer I still need a space to display my work, my process and my creativity. It’s not so much the need for an audience that is fuelling my need to be online, but a need to share. A need to know that if what I’m doing can help ignite ideas in someone else as well as myself, I must. I am no longer a 12 year old. I have valuable insights, experiences and thoughts to add to the wider discussion. I still feel like online can play its part here, but I’m training myself out of my belief that its the only place to ‘be seen’. I look to radical print cultures and organisations of the past for inspiration here. As always, it’s a work in progress.
I’m also keeping paper diaries again (sadly not Star Wards themed, but never say never) to help me process my own thoughts. In private. Because I worry that too much of my life, thoughts and actions are subconsciously driven by the need to be seen as ‘the good girl’. I don’t want to create solely to produce content for an audience to see. I want to create because it’s in my human being.